Portal 2 review

It can't have escaped your notice over the past few weeks that a
game called Portal 2 has been released. Launching with one of the more impressive alternate reality games that we've seen in a while, which
involved playing a selection of indie titles gathered into
something called the Potato
Sack, news about Portal 2 hasn't exactly been
thin on the ground -- on this site or any other.

But an impressive launch campaign doesn't make a game good, and
while the original Portal from 2007 was a delightful
surprise in a compilation of developer Valve's other games, the
hype around release is far, far greater this time around.
Thankfully, for once, that hype appears to be justified -- Portal 2 is incredible. So
incredible, in fact, that I'm going to split this review in half so
that I don't spoil the best jokes for you.

On this page is a spoiler-free review of the game. You can
safely scroll all the way to the bottom, and you won't meet
anything that isn't mentioned or shown off in the game's teaser
trailer or in the first few minutes of play. On the next page,
all bets are off -- I'll be talking about that incredible bit
where... well, you'll have to click over to find out. If you're
planning on buying the game, just read this page. Sod our pageviews
target. If it doesn't convince you, then click through to page 2,
but don't say I didn't warn you.

Aperture Science
The game begins, after a short tutorial, with your character,
Chell, waking up in the Aperture Science research facility, many
many years after the events of the first game. It's been so long
that nature has begun to reclaim the test chambers, with languorous
vines strung across gaps in the architecture, piles of dead leaves
and rusty equipment lying in dark corners, and birdsong echoing
throughout the facility.

Your guide in the first part of the game is Wheatley, a
personality core ripped off the facility's evil AI, GLaDOS, in the
dying moments of the first game. He's voiced by Stephen Merchant, comedy partner of Ricky Gervais and possibly
the most Bristolian voice ever to have been heard in a
videogame.

Merchant's voice work, along with the return of Ellen McLain as
GLaDOS, is absolutely hilarious. Valve's Chet Faliszek told Rock, Paper, Shotgun that "If you're not laughing
in the first ten minutes because of Stephen Merchant, you're dead."
He's absolutely right. Portal 2 is a very, very funny
game.

Thinking with Portals
It's also a difficult game. That's not necessarily a bad thing. It
puts you into a series of situations where you need to manipulate
your environment using the portal gun to get from an entrance to an
exit. That could involve putting a cube on a big red button, or it
could involve sending reality-bending gel flying through
anti-gravity tubes in the air.

Thankfully, the difficulty usually revolves around working out
what to do, not actually doing it. In most parts of the game, the
execution is relatively trivial -- shoot a portal here, so that one
thing falls through another, and you can get from here to there.
It's a little tougher on a controller than it is with a mouse and
keyboard, but at no point is the execution hard.

A light touch
Working out what to do, though, often is. Valve uses light very
cleverly in its games, employing it to draw the eye to where the
solution is, but even then it's sometimes hard to establish which
wall you need to be flying out of to get to that patch of light --
especially once the facility... oh wait. No spoilers. Essentially,
every room that you walk into will induce a "WTF?" reaction, but
with a bit of experimentation, and remembering that almost
everything available to you is there for a reason, you'll chip away
at the solution to the puzzle.

If there's one criticism to be had of the level design, it's
that there's no big final overarching puzzle where you have to use
everything that you've learnt. The boss fight at the very end of
the game is trivial, and there's little before it that offers any
kind of indication that it's coming -- you'll be solving puzzles,
and then suddenly it's upon you. The game would have benefited with
a couple of final, really hard puzzles requiring gel, light
bridges, anti-gravity tubes, turrets and lasers all needing to be
arranged in perfect harmony. Or perhaps I'm just being just
masochistic.

Instead, the pacing -- from the start to the grand finale -- is
provided by the narrative that runs throughout the game, rather
than the puzzles themselves. Every few chambers, you'll get a bit
of plot to reward you, which in turn opens up scenarios for more
puzzles. Without giving too much away, the way the plot ties in
with the game mechanics is expertly done. There's none of what
Clint Hocking called "ludonarrative dissonance" in his critique of Bioshock -- everything just makes sense, and it's
clear that Valve has worked very, very hard for that to be the
case.

Atlas and P-Body
Then there's the co-op section, which is set after the events of
the single-player game, and so contains a few spoilers itself. It's
harder still, but because you've got two brains working in parallel
to solve the same puzzles, you're much less likely to get stuck in
a chamber that you just can't solve.

It has the same joys as the single-player, but with the added
bonus that you're often relying on the other player, who'll
"accidentally" crush you or drop you in the acid on a regular
basis. Portal 2 is the kind of game that has the potential
to cause some serious arguments. That surprisingly-competitive
atmosphere is enhanced by GLaDOS' voiceovers, which frequently laud
one player at the expense of the other.

--

Portal 2 is an incredible achievement. The few moments
where it doesn't quite match expectations are brief and more than
outweighed by the moments where you suddenly "get" how to solve a
chamber and you feel like the smartest person in the entire world.
It represents one of the best game designers in the world doing
what it does better than its ever done it before. If that's not a
reason to buy it, what is?

Reminder: the second page of this review contains
significant spoilers about the ending of the game.
Don't read it if you want the surprise for yourself.